Looking Forward

Old SF novels contain many strange and surprising "predictions".
Robert Conquest's A World of Difference (1955) is set in 2009 or
thereabouts, and incidentally features a "Poet" class of
spaceships named after the author's verse-writing pals like Kingsley
Amis, Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin. The big moment comes in the
headquarters of "that most distinguished and exclusive of all
bodies, the [British] Interplanetary Society", where we meet its "ninety-odd-years-old
Honorary President" – the legendary Sir Arthur. Yes, Arthur C.
Clarke's 1998 knighthood was predicted in 1955. Sheer accident, of
course.

The same is true of a futurological quip I rather wish I hadn't made
right here in 1998 – discovered by SF fan Tom Whitmore in my collection
The SEX Column and gleefully
copied back to me. I'd been banging on about the senile decay of SF
authors like L. Ron Hubbard: "Well, we all get older and may yet go
gaga. A few decades hence, perhaps Sir Terry Pratchett will celebrate
his 80th birthday by launching the First Church of Discworld..."

As Tom depressingly put it, "Probably the first mention of Sir
Terry as such, but did you have to get the Early Onset Alzheimer's right
too?" Oh dear! You'll all know about Sir Terry's hero work
campaigning for Alzheimer's research, thanks to saturation media
coverage including this year's two BBC2 programmes. Daily Telegraph
readers will remember how that paper's TV reviewer Damian Thompson
couldn't resist enlivening the painful story with a sideswipe at "the
assorted saddos at the annual convention devoted to Discworld ... the
account executives dressed as dragons, the health and safety officers in
princely robes". Such originality, such well-timed wit; how we all
roared.

Startlingly prophetic SF extrapolations go back a long way.
Sometimes authors got the right answer by logic, like Kepler predicting
weightlessness in space in his 1634 dream-story Somnium. More
often they were trying to be satirical, like Jonathan Swift with his
hand-cranked knowledge machine or expert system generating new concepts
at random in the Laputa section of Gulliver's Travels (1726).
Sometimes a wild guess comes off: Swift also mentions the two moons of
Mars, which 1726 telescopes weren't powerful enough to reveal.

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888) predicted
the credit card if not the credit crunch. Air-to-surface missiles are
deployed in The Angel of the Revolution (1893) by George
Griffith. Robert Cromie's The Crack of Doom has the first
plausible description of an atomic bomb, in 1895. Automatic doors – "a
long strip of this apparently solid wall rolled up with a snap" – seem to have been dreamed up by H G Wells in When the Sleeper Wakes
(1899). Wells also invented the joystick control with firing button, for
his awesome war machines in "The Land Ironclads" (1903).
Clever lot, those Victorians.

It was another Victorian who predicted rival brands of advanced
machines, and maybe even PC/Macintosh or Windows/Linux wars: "Among
themselves the machines will war eternally, but they will still require
man as the being through whose agency the struggle will be principally
conducted. In point of fact there is no occasion for anxiety about the
future happiness of man so long as he continues to be in any way
profitable to the machines..." This mildly boggling piece of
long-range futurology comes from Samuel Butler's Erewhon,
published in 1872. Now you know why the pogrom against all artificial
intelligence in the back-story of Frank Herbert's Dune was
called the Butlerian Jihad.

Finally, Jules Verne famously scored a lucky near-bullseye in From
the Earth to the Moon (1865), with his manned Moon shot being fired
from the nonexistent Stones Hill near Tampa, Florida – just across the
state (and a short distance south) from Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy
Space Center, where Apollo 11 was indeed launched Moonwards in July
1969. Verne's geographical accuracy was pretty good when you consider he
was shooting at 104 years' range.

Let's hope his predictometer was less well calibrated when he gave
this speech to a chap called Kennedy in Five Weeks in a Balloon
(1863): "... If men go on inventing machinery they'll end by being
swallowed up by their own inventions. I've often thought that the last
day will be brought about by some colossal boiler heated to three
thousand atmospheres blowing up the world." Quick as a flash, his
companion replies: "And I bet the Yankees will have a hand in it."